Hive

Hive: shelter of a colony of bees.Roof: part of the hive that protects it from bad weather.Alveolate frame (honeycombed frame):
frame containing the cells.Hive body: box.Supporting platform: base of the hive.Entrance: opening through which the bees enter and leave the
hive.Canopy: part of the hive that protects the entrance from the
wind.Matling: small, thick particle board used to divide the hive.Super: object used to raise the hive.Ventilation hole (air hole): hole that allows the circulation
of air.

Photo :

EN : Honeycomb

FR : Alvéole
d'abeille

ES : Panal

A honeycomb is a mass of hexagonal wax
cells built by honey bees in their nests to contain their larvae and
stores of honey and pollen. Beekeepers may remove the entire honeycomb
to harvest honey. Honey bees consume about 8.4 pounds of honey to secrete
one pound of wax, so it makes economic sense to return the wax to the
hive after harvesting the honey, commonly called "pulling honey"
or "robbing the bees" by beekeepers. The structure of the
comb may be left basically intact when honey is extracted from it by
uncapping and spinning in a centrifugal machine the honey extractor.
Fresh, new comb is sometimes sold and used intact as comb honey, especially
if the honey is being spread on bread rather than used in cooking or
to sweeten tea. Broodcomb becomes dark over time, because of the cocoons
embedded in the cells and the tracking of many feet, called travel stain
by beekeepers when seen on frames of comb honey. Honeycomb in the "supers"
that are not allowed to be used for brood stays light coloured. Numerous
wasps, especially polistinae and vespinae, construct hexagonal prism
packed combs made of paper instead of wax; and in some species (like
Brachygastra mellifica), honey is stored in the nest, thus technically
forming a paper honeycomb. However, the term "honeycomb" is
not often used for such structures.

The axes of honeycomb cells are always
quasi-horizontal, and the non-angled rows of honeycomb cells are always
horizontally (not vertically) aligned. Thus, each cell has two vertical
walls, with "floors" and "ceilings" composed of
two angled walls. The cells slope slightly upwards, between 9 and 14
degrees, towards the open ends. There are two possible explanations
for the reason that honeycomb is composed of hexagons, rather than any
other shape. One, given by Jan Brozek, is that the hexagon tiles the
plane with minimal surface area. Thus a hexagonal structure uses the
least material to create a lattice of cells within a given volume. Another,
given by D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, is that the shape simply results
from the process of individual bees putting cells together: somewhat
analogous to the boundary shapes created in a field of soap bubbles.
In support of this he notes that queen cells, which are constructed
singly, are irregular and lumpy with no apparent attempt at efficiency.
The closed ends of the honeycomb cells are also an example of geometric
efficiency, albeit three-dimensional and little-noticed. The ends are
trihedral (i.e., composed of three planes) pyramidal in shape, with
the dihedral angles of all adjacent surfaces measuring 120°, the
angle that minimizes surface area for a given volume.

Beekeeping is the practice of humans maintenance
of honeybee colonies in hives. A beekeeper may keep bees in order to
collect honey. Early forms of honey collecting entailed the destruction
of the entire colony when the honey was harvested. The wild hive was
crudely broken into, using smoke to suppress the bees, the honeycombs
were torn out and smashed up, along with the eggs, larvae and honey
they contained. The liquid honey from the destroyed brood nest was crudely
strained through a sieve or basket.

This was destructive and unhygienic but
for hunter-gatherer societies this did not matter, since the honey was
generally consumed immediately and there were always more wild colonies
to exploit. However, in settled societies, the destruction of the bee
colony meant the loss of a valuable resource; this drawback persisted
until the 19th Century, which made beekeeping both inefficient and something
of a 'stop and start' activity. There could be no continuity of production
and no possibility of selective breeding, since each bee colony was
destroyed at harvest time, along with its precious queen. During the
medieval period abbeys and monasteries were centers of beekeeping since
beeswax was highly prized for candles and fermented honey was used to
make alcoholic mead in areas of Europe where vines would not grow.